Yesterday afternoon I was changing Lily’s nappy and it was a complicated affair as it sometimes can be. I could hear Amelia down in the playroom thumping around, tipping toys out of boxes and so on, as she does. I called down to her to ask what she was up to.

“I’m pretending to be Bob the Builder!” she replied. That sounded harmless enough so I kept changing Lily. And then just as I finished I had to start over, as you sometimes need to do.

Finally she was all done so I took her back the the lounge room and put her on the mat and watched her start to roll and roll and I started to put some cups in the dishwasher.

And then Amelia called “Mum, I need some help!”. There was no panic in her voice what-so-ever, but for some reason I felt a sudden desperate lurch, probably remembering that I had meant to check on her Bob the Builder antics as soon as I was free, and I ran down the hall to the playroom.

For a moment I couldn’t locate her in all the mess…

“Where are you?” I bleated a little stupidly.

“Here!” and I turned to see her in the corner near the bookcase, looking like this:

In fact, I have drawn the whole structure to look much more solid than it actually was. It was literally teetering.

“Can you help me reach the paints?” She asked. She was trying to get the pots of paint down from the very top of the highest (2 metre) bookcase and when I saw that she had some of the pots already on the floor and had already started to paint various surfaces I realised she had been climbing up and down this stack for some time. ARGGH!

After lifting her down to safety, I looked around and in the mess I saw other smaller teetering structures which had obviously been tried and failed attempts at getting high enough before finally settling on her Tower of Doom. One consisted of her small kid’s table, a stool, a doll’s mattress and a plastic basket which looked far scarier than any other. I spent the rest of yesterday afternoon in a state of mild shock at what could have been. I spent a lot of time pondering how you can have a playroom which has no boxes, chairs, benches, stools, tables, paint, bookcases or stackable items of any nature and instead has close-circuit video cameras, alarms and maybe some… ummm… cushions to play with. FAR better.

I have been so grumpy these last few days! Maybe it’s just the heat… It would be too cruel if it was a result of too much sleep. Perhaps it’s something to do with dropping the overnight feed and the change in hormone levels.

Breastfeeding hormones have a lot to answer for.

Firstly, I am losing vast amounts of hair. It happened last time in the months after Amelia was born (and strangely when I worked at Wishlist… who knows what that was about, certainly not breastfeeding) and I know it’s only temporary but it’s a little disconcerting to be shedding with such abandon. It worries me when I cook, and it annoys me all day as I feel little spider feet running across my arms and shoulders, only to realise it’s just another stray hair or two or three.

And secondly… my eyebrows have gone crazy! I have been going to have them, um, “seen to” about every six weeks until now but it’s just not often enough! Last time I went to visit the kindly, motherly beautician she said: “Wow! Your eyebrows lead you into the room! It’s time to do something about that! Hooee, I don’t think I have ever seen them this bad! Wow! Those hormones are really doing it to you, hey?”.

I come from a family of generously eyebrowed folks, and it’s something I have always just accepted as being part of “me”. In fact during parts of my 20s I was incredibly proud of my lush bohemian brows. But now in my mid 30s I never bargained on my caterpillar brows becoming more like mutant mad-professor brows. And I never thought that it would be coupled with frightening hair loss, all potentially making me look scarily like my late Grandfather who was something of a bald, wild-eyebrowed, mad professor type.

So there you have it. Some things you probably didn’t want to know about me… perhaps I was crazy to post this as I know people in real life who read this blog and who I will now become increasingly paranoid around when having them over for dinner or bumping into them on the street. As we chat I will be mentally barking “I KNOW YOU ARE LOOKING AT MY EYEBROWS!”… and now that I’ve written that, they will be working very hard not to look at my eyebrows. Actually, if we have them over to dinner, they will be wise not to look at my eyebrows at all but to keep a keen eye on their dinner… unless I invest in a hairnet in the not too distant future.

(Did my social calendar just suddenly become spookily empty?).

Bush fires, extreme heat, power failures and possible power restrictions on top of water restrictions and smoke filled air are all daily reminders of why I can’t stand Summer.

Can.not.stand.it.

Since we got back from the beach I have been checking the Age’s weather forecast page every few hours with tired resignation but I just cheered HOORAH! when I saw that Saturday’s 38°c has now gone down to 32°c. That 6 year old birthday party we have to attend will be a little less sultry. Last year all the chocolate coins hidden for the treasure hunt had melted to sticky hot-chocolate liquid. At least this year I won’t be pregnant. I have been speaking to my mum on the phone who has recently become quite the web-savvy-gran and she will say, “I’ve been watching the weather radar and it’s raining everywhere but here!”. She, like me, is completely weather obsessed.

So we can only water twice a week and that’s if you can remember to spring out of bed (or go out in the dark) during the designated hours on the designated days. We are planning on getting a water tank to collect rainwater (if and when it rains) but there is a huge waiting list on those. So in the meantime there is the bath water. This morning I transported 7 buckets of saved kid’s bath water out to the garden and tipped them all over my thirsty beans, tomatoes, herbs and young trees. It was quite the ordeal. I had to sneak past Sleeping Lily’s (woot!) door and down the stairs while wearing my flip-flops without spilling too much of the precious stuff, over and over again. Sneaking in flip-flops is really hard, there is quite an art to sucking them up against your soles and I notice that tonight I have aching toes from scrunching them. I think there may be a new and surprising market for water carrying vessels we can wear on our heads opening up because it was tiring work.

On a side note, while I am feeling very hot, and grumpy and very AUSTRALIAN (because feeling hot and grumpy is a national pastime), the Times Mummy blog reckons Kiddley is “almost unbearably perky and American“. Who woulda thunk it?